jeudi 17 juillet 2014

Animals that don't Exist

The
Human Ant

The
human ant, Pseudomyrmex
sapiense, is one of
the most extraordinary creatures in the world. Or, to be more
precise, it is one of the most extraordinary colony of living beings
in the world. Making its first recorded appearance in Jean-Claude
Toubib’s “Insectes des Amériques, et autres petites bêtes”
(Insects of the
Americas, and other small creatures),
written in 1547, its existence has been largely hidden from the
public eye, for reasons that are all too obvious.

The
human ant is a close relative of Pseudomyrmex
ferruginea, a species
who lives in symbiosis with a tree, using the plant as a nest in
exchange for protection against predators and pests. When humans
first settled in central
America, ferruginea’s
habitat, about twenty-thousand
years ago, it seems that the ants evolved to establish a similar
symbiotic relationship with humans. The humans would carry the ants
within their bodies, and enable them to access resources that would
otherwise stay out of reach for the small insects. In exchange, the
ants would scout out the area at night, leading their hosts to
plentiful patches of food, as well as serve as an alarm system for
approaching danger. At least, modern theories suggested that this is
the beginning of the human ant’s evolution. But it does not stop
there.

Curiously,
the human hosts of the ants would, at the end of their life, drown
themselves in deep, eutrophic ponds. These waters, devoid of oxygen
in the lower layers, have ideal conditions for conservation of soft
tissues as well as bones. Due to their small size, and the fact that
they are an inhospitable habitat to most forms of complex life, they
are usually devoid of fossils. However, the peculiar habit of human
ant hosts has created what is believed to be the most complete record
of mammal and insect evolution to this day. It is this find that
enables us to retrace the story with great precision on a
morphological scale, which in turn allows us to infer much of what
has transpired on a behavioral and evolutionary scale.

One
way or another, the ants took greater and greater control of their
human hosts, to the point that they became able to influence, and
later control, their host’s movements. Since the needs of the two
species were not entirely aligned (the nature of preferred food, the
amount of sleep humans needed, as well as the large amount of energy
consumed by their brain), the ants used their new-gained influence to
skew host behavior in their favor. In
the beginning, this was
mainly done through the release of specific pheromones, but
in later specimens, clear physical alterations can be seen.

As
the relationship progressed, the ants started to infect humans at an
increasingly early stage in life, which allowed them to “train”
their hosts to perform behaviors detrimental to themselves, but
beneficial to their guests. In combination, the ants were able to
influence the morphological development. At first, it seems their
main concern was to increase the space that was available for them,
either by increasing overall body size, or reducing the size of
specific organs. The brain was no exception, and in less than a
hundred generations, the majority of human hosts were left with only
their reptilian brain, and the parts that controlled motor function
and sensorial input. The prefrontal cortex had disappeared
completely, and infected individuals lost the ability to perform
higher cognitive functions.

These
specimens, driven solely by their guests’ pheromones, were
equivalent to robots. Machines at the mercy of their masters, unable
to take any independent actions, procreating only when the ants
needed a new home. And so they remained until this day, even though
no significant changes in the
human DNA have been found.

Toubib’s
manuscript, when he presented it to his colleagues, caused an uproar,
and it was quickly decided that it should be banned. But interest in
the ants did not die so quickly. Several people in the nobility, as
well as a number of eminent scientists, saw the human ants as the
perfect workforce.

They
would do the most strenuous of tasks without complaining, as long as
it allowed them to reap something of benefit to their insect hosts.
And the things most valuable to ants are not the things most valuable
to man.

In
the years that followed, several expeditions set out to bring back
specimens to the old continent, and explore their potential as cheap,
obedient labor. However, it soon became clear that the ants, once
removed from their natural habitat, were very hard to train, being
incapable of understanding the concept of a differed reward (e.g.
working today to get paid tomorrow). The project was quickly
abandoned, although some specimens were kept in secret, either for
“fun”, or to be used in tortures (the prospect of becoming an
ant-riddled zombie could cause even the most hardened soldier to
confess).

In
recent times, however, interest in the ants has resurfaced. The way
the manipulate the human mind, and the precision with which they
managed to eradicate cognitive functions while preserving the
physical control mechanisms of the brain, might hold a clue as to
where “intelligence” comes from. It might also enable us to
better understand the functions we perform everyday, and enable us to
build artificial systems that can perform physical tasks as well as
actual humans. And who knows, somebody might just stumble upon a way
to train the ants ?